The Steal by Rachel Shteir Page B

sentenced Taylor to four and a half years. As Taylor liked to joke, William Kunstler had only been sentenced to four years, three months for that offense. He sent Kunstler a telegram: “We try harder.”
    One description of the trial described Taylor as “the star performer in the center ring of a three-ring circus.” The judge settled for calling the star performer flippant and saying that he badgered some witnesses, interrupted others, and was in general disrespectful. Taylor demanded the right to go to trial over the contempt charges, which he was denied. But when the case arrived in the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 1974, Taylor was vindicated 8–1. The majority ruled that he had been denied due process and that the Louisville judge, personally embroiled in Taylor’s fate, was biased.
    Taylor and Davis never discussed whether the photographer had shoplifted or not. The attorney immediately moved the case from the local court, where it had languished, to the Western District Court of Kentucky. Since the flyer depicted alleged criminals and Davis had not been tried in a court of law, it constituted punishment without due process, was unconstitutional, and violated his civil rights, Taylor argued. By then, Davis had quit the paper. “The case made it difficult to get assignments,” he said.
    The district court dismissed Davis’s case. “[T]he facts alleged in this case do not establish that plaintiff has been deprived of any right secured to him by the Constitution of the United States.” Taylor appealed. In 1974, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in Davis’s favor after Taylor attacked the flyer as an “indiscriminate lumping of the innocent and guilty alike.” The police chiefs appealed and the case was bumped up to the Supreme Court. Taylor sought to sustain the Sixth Circuit decision. When Paul v. Davis was heard at the Supreme Court on November 4, 1975, Eddie Davis was living on food stamps.
    In Washington, Davis sat in the front row in the gallery with what Taylor called his “gang,” a group of people who worked on civil rights cases pro bono. Most had traveled from Kentucky and were staying with a Catholic priest in Silver Springs. Although he had been a defendant, Taylor had never argued a case at the Supreme Court.
    Carson Porter, the attorney for the police chiefs began by explaining the lower courts’ dismissal of Davis’s case and by saying that it should never have made it to the Supreme Court. At most, Paul v. Davis should have constituted an allegation of defamation; he rejected the argument that the flyer violated “(a) deprivation of constitutional right of privacy or (b) a denial of due process.”
    In the years prior to Paul v. Davis , the court had favored the individual over the state in some rulings on privacy cases. In 1973, Roe v. Wade had guaranteed privacy in the matter of abortion. Porter argued that shoplifting was hardly a fundamental right like abortion and that since Davis had not experienced “proof of any type of grievous injury,” his civil rights had not been violated. He quoted Albert C. Allen, Davis’s boss at the paper: “I have taken no action against this gentleman.”
    Porter next argued against the precedent that influenced the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule in Davis’s favor. This was based on a 1970 case called Wisconsin v. Constantineau in which the police chief of Hartford, Wisconsin, had posted pictures of heavy drinkers in liquor stores and bars and allowed these establishments to decline to serve those pictured for one year. The Supreme Court ruled this DIY Al-Anon to be an abuse of due process.
    Justice William Brennan, then the court’s most liberal member, objected that the flyer was circulated “without the slightest regard for due process.”
    Porter replied that because the shoplifter flyer had limited circulation, the chiefs’ abuse of Davis’s civil rights was less egregious than that of Constantineau , which